Curveball

Curveball Issue 36: The Titan’s Shadow

Related posts

Curveball Issue 18: A Game of Secrets

C. B. Wright

Curveball Issue One: Death of a Hero

C. B. Wright

Curveball Issue 11: Allies and Enemies

C. B. Wright

62 comments

cuatroojos 22 May 2021 at 3:12 PM

At last! Muchas gracias. Read the whole thing, mind is thoroughly blown.

You may wish to fix the typo at paragraph 6, first line. The “f” is missing from Red Shift’s name.

Reply
cuatroojos 22 May 2021 at 3:15 PM

Oops: that’s part two, paragraph 6, line 1.

Reply
cuatroojos 22 May 2021 at 3:26 PM

Typo immune to spell check, part 6, paragraph 91, sentence 3. Did you mean, “The small one jumps to his feet” rather than “his feat”?

Reply
C. B. Wright 22 May 2021 at 3:33 PM

Oh ouch, that missing f is *terrible*. 🙂

Fixed that, and feat/feet. Thanks for finding them.

Reply
cuatroojos 22 May 2021 at 8:01 PM

Re-reading part two, section where the scene shifts to Jenny: second paragraph refers to Liberty as Toby’s grandfather, third paragraph refers to Liberty as “his great-grandfather.” In context, the intent of the second reference could have been “his grandfather” again or “her (Jenny’s) great-grandfather”.

Reply
C. B. Wright 22 May 2021 at 8:12 PM

Another good catch. Liberty is Toby’s grandfather and Jenny’s great-grandfather. I’ve cleaned that up.

Reply
minrich 23 May 2021 at 7:49 PM

Great to have you back in the harness – so to speak.
Minor typo: Part Two, Para 5: a ‘d’ is missing in: one arm hangs limply by his sie as the empty sleeve…

Reply
C. B. Wright 24 May 2021 at 1:24 AM

Thanks minrich, should be fixed now.

Reply
Bjarne D Mathiesen 24 May 2021 at 9:28 AM

eternal joy, thatit seems we are alone no longer.”
eternal joy, that it seems we are alone no longer.”

Reply
Bjarne D Mathiesen 24 May 2021 at 9:31 AM

“Well, look, your Liberty’s great-granddaughter”
“Well, look, you’re Liberty’s great-granddaughter”

Reply
C. B. Wright 24 May 2021 at 9:44 AM

Thanks Bjarne. Fixed.

That spacing issue (“thatit”) is weird because it doesn’t show up in the original manuscript.

Reply
Bjarne D Mathiesen 24 May 2021 at 9:56 AM

faint gold spark appears toRed Shift’s right.
faint gold spark appears to Red Shift’s right.

Reply
C. B. Wright 24 May 2021 at 1:31 PM

Annnnnnd… fixed. Thanks!

Reply
cuatroojos 24 May 2021 at 10:46 PM

Part two, second section (Jenny), second paragraph, last sentence, linguistic quibble: “At the moment he’s laying down” should be “At the moment he’s lying down”. It may be said that in the previous episode when David moved Toby after casting his protective spell, he laid Toby down, but now Toby is lying down. For edification and amusement, you may wish to go to dictionary.com, enter the word “lay” in the definition blank and hit enter, then scroll down to the “Lay vs. Lie” video and enjoy.

Reply
C. B. Wright 25 May 2021 at 11:07 AM

That’s fixed. I don’t know why I mixed those up. But viewing grammar videos on the web is _never_ enjoyable. 😉

Reply
cuatroojos 26 May 2021 at 3:15 AM

Part 9, paragraph beginning “He can see the Chairman”, last sentence: Richter is misspelled “Reichter”. Possibly Freudian slip?

Reply
cuatroojos 26 May 2021 at 5:03 AM

Part 10, first paragraph, second sentence, first word should not contain the apostrophe. (Autocorrect does that to me sometimes, substituting the contraction for the possessive pronoun. Bad autocorrect!)

Reply
cuatroojos 26 May 2021 at 5:28 AM

Part 22:
– second paragraph, first sentence speaks of “dimly lit florescent lights” but I think you meant “fluorescent” since the dictionary says “florescent” means “flourishing”.
– fourth paragraph from the end, beginning “There is a low hum”, another “it’s” that should be “its”.

Reply
C. B. Wright 26 May 2021 at 10:49 PM

OK, got these too!

Reply
minrich 29 May 2021 at 3:23 PM

APOLOGIES FOR THE FORMATTING:
I just finished reading an excellent and enthralling tale (obviously shaving your head did nothing to kerb your style – I was worried a la Samson and Delilah that you might lose your talent).
Anyhow, the following typos, misspelling(s), and possible misunderstandings, by me, of your choice of words/phrases to this left-pondian, who only lived in the US for 21 years, triggered my antenna – but the story demanded that I keep reading. This resulted in a quick copy and paste (without commentary) and then a quick insert of the Part Number (so that you have a vague clue where to look).

Part Seven: Haruspex Analytics, Jason Klein’s Suite

He wouldn’t be the first to abandon a good team in favor of a promising promotion. To become “a suit,” as Billy would to say.

Part Eight: New York City, Downtown

David grins in spite of himself. “Because it’s better ‘Doctor Weird, Warlock Supreme.’”

Part Fourteen: Haruspex Analytics

Shewatches, calm and remote, and waits.

She at Justin. Without hesitation, he bolts toward the still glowing tear.

Part Eighteen: Haruspex Analytics, Ground Floor Lobby

The torso comes together in a rough outline, and in a matter of seconds he can the pieces of rock fuse together as the golem begins to reform.

Blue light flares up again, but it’s different this time. It flickers erratically, like a fluorescent light just before it does.

Part Nineteen: Haruspex Analytics, Upper Floors

Street Ronin crouches on the landing tile, his rifle trained on the closed door

Part Twenty Two: Manhattan, Alpha Checkpoint MCV

“That’s right,” the Senator’s image says. “Remember when I said the first virus—the that didn’t kill

It’s bad, Captain. Bad in way that, historically, cuts across old boundaries. . . . .. We’re talking genetic plague, Captian.”

Part Twenty Seven: Metamorphosis

As the wind rises, so dow the sound, the thummm growing louder, and behind it a second sound.

Part Twenty Nine: Downtown Manhattan

Para 2: It can’t move beyond this spot because the buildings surrounding it are too fall.

Alishia flies closer to the golem, keying up a volley of anti-vehicle missles

Part Thirty One: Ingress

No games, Sky Commando. We have a way to take out thegolem.

Part Thirty Three: Haruspex Analytics Golem, The Labyrinth

he knocks a new hole in the side dof the building and jumps.

Part Thirty Four: Aftermath

David starts looking through the crowd. “Now we round everyone up and go back to the Nautillus.

HTH

Reply
C. B. Wright 1 June 2021 at 12:10 AM

Thanks minrich, these are all now fixed!

Reply
minrich 2 June 2021 at 9:55 PM

Back again. Just checked the amendment that you made re. Part Nineteen (which is the deja vu all over again and again) and “on the landing tile” appears at least 5 more times – thanks be to Ctrl-F.

Reply
C. B. Wright 2 June 2021 at 10:29 PM

Can you be more specific? There are multiple times I use that phrase, but the ones I see are deliberate.

Reply
minrich 3 June 2021 at 6:22 AM

Sorry, my misunderstanding, my septuagenarian vocabulary didn’t extend to ‘landing tile’ as a thing, but google.com showed me the error of my ways – since multiple peoples being advertizing them are.

Reply
Alexander Hollins 4 June 2021 at 4:22 PM

part ten

not fighting against the other awareness, but fusing to cede what remains of his own identity.

refusing to cede?

Reply
Alexander Hollins 4 June 2021 at 4:52 PM

part seventeen

She twists his arm, and the he cries out in pain as the carbine clatters to the floor.

then he tries?

Reply
Alexander Hollins 4 June 2021 at 5:34 PM

part 24 “Where are these thingscoming from?” Jenny keeps

not sure if missing a space?

Reply
C. B. Wright 7 June 2021 at 8:27 AM

All fixed now!

Reply
Gauvain 10 June 2021 at 10:23 AM

And now to see where Regiment was during all this kerfuffle…
Thanks for coming back!

Reply
cuatroojos 11 June 2021 at 12:26 AM

Part 22, paragraph 43: “Sky Commander” should probably be “Sky Commando” unless the point is that Captain Banks (understandably) is so badly shaken he isn’t even using Sgt. Webb’s proper title. He gets it right two paragraphs later.

Part 22, paragraphs 39 and 41: not sure about this. 39 refers to “the worst of the group” as a tossup between Crossfire and Overmind. In 41, Sky Commando tells Captain Banks that Haruspex is “much worse than either of those groups could hope to be”, where “either of those groups” seems to be a reference back to Crossfire and Overmind. Am I misreading this, or is she calling Overmind a group?

Reply
cuatroojos 11 June 2021 at 12:47 AM

One of those typos that spellcheck will never catch: Part 26, paragraph 1, last sentence: “standing father back”: s/father/farther.

Reply
cuatroojos 11 June 2021 at 12:56 AM

Part 27, paragraph 15, sentence 4: the word “shifts” is missing an “f”.

Reply
C. B. Wright 11 June 2021 at 1:10 AM

Thanks for catching those. They should be fixed now!

Reply
cuatroojos 11 June 2021 at 1:20 AM

Part 29:
Paragraph 33:
– sentence 5: need a space here: durabilityconverging. “durability” is in italics in the actual text.
– next to last sentence: “it’s attention” should be “its attention”.
Paragraph 44, next to last sentence: “one a little to low” “to” needs another “o”.
Paragraph 48, last sentence: “She adjusts her position, putting as much of the base of her cable between herself and the ones closing in.” “as much” seems to want another “as” but I’m not sure exactly what you want here.

Reply
cuatroojos 11 June 2021 at 1:30 AM

Part 30:
Paragraph 11, first sentence, after the second dash: “is throws it”: s/is/it
Paragraph 31: last sentence: “keeping out of site” out of “sight”?

Reply
Christopher Kribs 12 June 2021 at 7:03 PM

Beautiful, beautiful work. Thank you so much for sharing.

Partway through Part Seventeen there appears to be some paragraph-level cleanup needed at the point where the Chairman nearly comes in to check on Artemis, but then changes his mind. Two versions of the same passage? –>

“Our guest…” Suddenly the Chairman sounds weary. He sighs. “The resources we will need to expend to keep him in check will be… prohibitive. I fear we will be forced to leave him behind.” Phyllis is surprised by the amount of regret in the Chairman’s voice. Who is he talking about?

“I should, at least, say farewell…”

Footsteps close in on the door, and when the door handle begins to turn her heart nearly stops. But it stops, then returns to its original position as the hand on the other side lets go.

“No,” the Chairman says. “We don’t have the time. It galls me to leave him behind

Ah. Yes.” The Chairman hmmms thoughtfully. “I fear we won’t be able to take him with us. The resources we’d need to expend to keep him in check are best used on other things. Come, the door is here.”

The group comes to a stop, and for a terror-filled moment Phyllis is convinced they’ve stopped in front of her door. Seconds pass, then something clicks on the other side of the hall, and the footsteps move off carpet, onto stone. The door clicks a second time as it swings shut. The hallway is silent once again.

Reply
C. B. Wright 12 June 2021 at 10:09 PM

@cuatroojos: thanks for the extra updates. They’re all fixed. Sidenote: the issue with the two words being crammed together without a space between them is an oddity because it never shows up in my original text — it’s a result of dumping the text into WordPress. So far I haven’t figured out what it is that’s making WordPress remove the spaces. I assume it isn’t random, though it looks that way to me.

@Christopher Krebs: aaaaaAAAAAAaaaaaAAAaaaaaaaaAAAAaaaaaa fixed now. 😀

Reply
Christopher Kribs 13 June 2021 at 11:59 AM

You’ve done a terrific job keeping so many different narrative strands going without getting all tangled. Bravo.

Part Twenty-Eight, paragraph 4, another sentence-level blip: “He grimaces, thrusting his right hand left arm and his side.”

Reply
C. B. Wright 13 June 2021 at 9:49 PM

That’s fixed now as well.

Reply
cuatroojos 13 June 2021 at 11:28 PM

Part 17, third-to-last paragraph, last sentence: “careless” needs to be in its adverbial form, “carelessly”.

Reply
C. B. Wright 13 June 2021 at 11:55 PM

Fixed!

Reply
cuatroojos 14 June 2021 at 12:25 AM

Part 6:
– Paragraph 73 begins “Int he”; “In the”?
– Paragraph 93, beginning “David doesn’t reply”: in the second sentence, “exends” looks like it wants to be “extends”.
– Paragraph 11, first sentence, “more than match”, maybe “more than a match”?

Reply
C. B. Wright 14 June 2021 at 12:50 AM

OK, those are fixed now too.

Reply
cuatroojos 14 June 2021 at 8:59 AM

Part 22, paragraph 41, last word: s/Captian/Captain

Reply
C. B. Wright 14 June 2021 at 9:27 AM

It was literally SURROUNDED by other instances of the word spelled correctly. Sigh. 🙂

Fixed now.

Reply
cuatroojos 18 June 2021 at 12:27 AM

> It was literally SURROUNDED by other instances of the word spelled correctly. Sigh.
If your fingers are anything like mine, they don’t *care* how many times you have spelled a given word correctly. And I echo your Sigh.

Reply
Mycroft W 18 June 2021 at 12:00 PM

C.B., Thanks so much for this! Amazing!

It’s been so long since 35 (and 35 made no sense to me at the time!), that I just bit the bullet and reread from the beginning, and then crashed straight through 36. Wow. Really well done – I can see where the breaks would be for 36a, b, and c if you could break from “year 3”, but boy does it work as a whole.

I actually thought it would be the complete wrapup, since it took that long to “pull in all the loose ends and stories”. But no – it’s just the cliffhanger to Year 4, “on the clock” as it were. Can’t complain about that!

Since I did do a compleat runthrough (spelling intended), I then did it again, trying to pay attention to blips and continuity issues. I have a bunch of notes (some on 36 might already be noted here), plus a Liberty Family Tree – what’s the best way to get them to you, should you want them? I could post it here or the forums, but it is the size of one of your smaller chapters; plus some of the questions are “I could very easily be wrong here, having not understood context”, so, not sure you want those ideas that public.

Note: the email registered with my account is live and commonly read, if you don’t want to put anything out in the open yourself!

Also note: there were threads running through the story that I only saw on the “editing runthrough” – and I’ve read (what was, at the time) the whole story, I think 5 times now. Love the world and character-building that has clearly always been there, but I haven’t noticed happening in serial form.

Reply
C. B. Wright 18 June 2021 at 12:24 PM

I would love to see those notes! You can send them to

wrightc

– at –

eviscerati

– dot –

org

Reply
Mycroft W 19 June 2021 at 10:45 PM

sent (in case I sent it to the wrong address). Wow, again!

Reply
stillwaters 30 July 2021 at 2:18 PM

Wow what a trip!

Reply
1 2

Leave a Comment